Just Keeps Going Bump in the Night
by Piccylo
Summary: What's the difference between a haunted house and a termite-infested house? You can hire an exterminator for the termites. A dead ninja, stolen of his chance to speak to his still-living friend, proceeds to be a pest to a poor old medium.


Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, not a part of Viz or Shonen Jump, don't even know Kishimoto or any of his team, or anyone that had anything to do with any production of Naruto ever. This **one-shot** contains some cursing, mildly violent descriptions, and SPOOKY STUFF.

Notice the publish date! I wrote this chapter after chapter 468, and it makes a bit of a prediction at the end for chapters in the somewhat near future. If I end up being wrong, I don't care, and I'm not going back to edit it. And remember: ONE SHOT!

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Most people find the various manifestations of the dead in the material plane—ghosts, ghouls, spirits, geists, wanderers, demons, youkai, mononoke, wraiths, what-have-you—if not fantastical, then at least disturbing. Not a surprise, since human beings have an understandable aversion to death and the subject of death. What they do understand is pretty clear cut and laid out to them as mortality: everything that is born, dies. Simple, clean, very easy to manage logically… a convenient binary function. When something starts messing with that understanding, in any way, it muddles people's minds and they either disregard it or fear it, coupled with the fear of death that stems from the real knowledge that yes, it will, eventually, happen to them one day as well. But those who become used to the understanding of the departed contacting the living, whether by study or by situation, no longer regard them in the thick fear of "someone is in my house watching me", and at worst find them a bad nuisance. Astral pests, if you will.

In the time following the attack on Konohagakure by the Akatsuki, a rather small minority in the world had to deal with a temporary headache, and the closer they were to ground zero, the worse it was. Now, one should note that it isn't because of all the death that happened at the site… mass killing happens, and it doesn't screw everything up for those few that could speak with the dead just because of a sudden influx of parties entering into the spirit world. The problem originated from the jutsu the Akatsuki leader Pain used to bring all that he had killed back to life, which wonked things out of control and made the dearly-departed a little miffed that they didn't get to talk to their old friends again for the rest of eternity.

Some spirits managed to say their piece to their old ninja comrades or surviving family before the killed in Konoha returned to their bodies, but a vast many did not, because they were either unaware, or they were already too busy talking to someone else. Soon the mediums of the world managed to console the dead enough to go back to sleep and just _wait_ for the ninja to die again—since, being ninja, it shouldn't really be that long anyway. It took a few weeks, but things went back to normal for the mediums, and the dead decided that it was okay to be dead for now.

Except for one unfortunate soul in the outskirts of Kuni no Hi.

He was an old man whose closeness with the spiritual world was as much physical as it was metaphysical, as one-foot-in-the-grave he was, and this was rather his only source of income at his age, so he milked this talent of his for all it was worth. He had a few dead friends that were pretty reliable for him, and they ran errands for him that only the departed could do. So he could do a number of things besides just "contacting" old friends and family for people, like making good predictions and whatever else magic people needed that wasn't from technology or ninja. And what he was afflicted with was a precocious young teen that had something really important to tell an old friend but couldn't because someone else got to him first.

The boy first appeared right when the jutsu was made, wearing the dirty ninja uniform and goggles he'd died in, a red and white fan emblazoned on the back of his jacket. Someone was ahead of him and waylaid the person he was trying to talk to in the transitional part of the afterlife that he himself didn't dwell in. He bothered the old man with his grievance.

"Look," the old man grumbled, "Don't you see all these other spirits here? Everyone has the same damn complaint that you do. Why don't you just go back to your grave and let _him_ come back to _you_."

"But now that he's alive, I've got something important-"

"So important that you have to tell me about it?" the old man groused, "Just go away and let me clear out my house, will ya?"

The teen blinked out, but as soon as the old man brought the spirits down to a reasonable sum, he came back in again.

"I really need to talk to that idiot!" the boy insisted, "It's important, damnit!"

The old man sighed. "Alright. What is the trouble? I'm an old man and you're a young ghost. You need to go back to your rest of the dead, and I need to go back _my_ rest so I'm _not_ dead. What is it that keeps you bound to the material plane so?"

The boy frowned. "I told you: I need to talk to him."

"I'm an old man, son, and I can't travel that far to see some ninja in Konohagakure and take you with me. Would a letter do?"

"No!" he shouted, "If you just send a letter, that moron'll think you're crazy or something! I need to talk to him, or at least have someone talk to him for me. I'm so cross at him right now I-!"

"Surely there isn't someone else closer to him that you can bring this to? Or at least younger…"

The corrupting anger flew away a moment and the boy shook his head. "Anyone else is holed up with seals to calm things down from all the other spirits and I can't get a bead on them. Those who can't make seals aren't really good at being mediums and just think that they're imagining things when I try to talk to them. But I got to you first so I know where you are."

"I'm sorry, but you'll just either have to wait for your friend to die or until you can talk to a more willing medium. I cannot do your task."

"Right now, I hardly consider him 'my friend'!" The spirit huffed and turned his head away. "Lazy asshole."

"It's hardly his fault that another spirit got to him before you did? His father takes importance, after all."

"That's not it! He hasn't kept his promise to me!"

The old man cringed and held his head. Beautiful. The spirit was awakened and reminded about something that upsets him. And from the looks of it, this guy was going to be stubborn. Well, this medium wasn't about to have a spirit of vengeance on his hands! He shooed away the ghost with some spiritual force (pretty much pressing the spirit away with chakra, though the old man didn't think of it that way), put up a sealing block, and went on with calming down those remaining spirits and getting them back to their own graves.

They were all gone by the end of that week. A few days after the very last one was cleared, he felt it was safe to open everything up and go back into business again.

Not a night later, that damned teenager showed up again.

The old man wasn't going to have any patience for it this time. "Go away!"

"No!" he yelled back, his black, spiky hairs bristled, "I have to talk to him! I can't let him ignore it any longer!"

The response to this effrontery was the medium pulling up his nearby wooden staff, tall and knotted, with a few empty, a few dried nutshells affixed to its summit with hemp twine. The nuts the _clacked_ together hollowly as he picked it up and waved it at the spirit. "Begone! Away! Leave! Depart! Remove thineself from my home!" He shook it angrily. "_Vamoose! Scat!_"

The spirit gave a growling sigh and dissolved away.

The next appearance came at breakfast the next morning, to which the old man responded as he did the night before. But the wandering soul would not give up so easily. Every push away that the old man gave was only ever temporary; the boy just kept coming back. He appeared in his tea, in his bathwater, in scattered leaves in the yard… He popped out of nowhere endlessly, trying to excite the old man any way he can, to perturb him into doing the deed he wanted.

The kid tried everything. He threw stuff around and broke things. He tried giving the old man nightmares. He appeared to him in the form of his death—a grisly end for a thirteen-year-old, with a bloody, half-crushed body—then when that didn't work he tried to appear as a horrible demon. The boy didn't have enough imagination to pull off anything more than a bat-winged, red-scaled apparition with glowing eyes and sharp teeth, which was just about anyone at that age could probably think up. Certainly nothing impressive enough to startle a salted spirit-walker like this one. He even tried the more subtly creepy methods like creaking doors and unnatural temperature changes, even just staring at him with the blankest expression he could muster, but the old man ignored those like he ignored the flies that buzzed by his porch.

Nothing the psychic could pull up removed the ghost from him, and nothing the ghost could attempt convinced the geezer to do what he wanted. It was a war of pure stubbornness, and neither side seemed like it was going to relent any time soon. Finally, there came a change in tactics.

When the old man was blocked by the dead ninja when trying to get to his stove, he wasn't the least bit surprised. "You're in my way, brat."

The ninja smiled a very mischievous smile. "I'm going to get you to break."

"Sure, sure," he rolled his eyes and went to his pantry to pull out some beans. The ninja followed.

"I mean it." His smile could be heard in his inert voice. "I'll get you to do what I asked. You'll even be happy to do it just to have it over with."

"Oh? Are you going to torture me, youngling?" The old man snorted.

"Soooomething like that!" His grin went wider. "Anyway, I was born in Konohagakure to an elite clan through my father, Tamotsu. He had married my mother, Chiyako, a year before that, which caused a little bit of an upset in the clan since she wasn't a ninja, but it was water under the bridge after I was born. Like everyone else in my family, I was expected to become a strong ninja, to, at the very least, become a diligent member in the police force in Konoha. I went to the ninja academy, where I met most of my friends, and about the age of five this asshole—"

"What the hell are you talking about?" The old man grimaced.

"I'm telling you everything. Now, as I was saying, when I was about five, this asshole graduated the academy alone and became a genin almost immediately. I was jealous as hell about this, of course, but it was a big issue at the time since he was supposed to be of my year. There was also this girl—"

"I don't want to hear it!"

"Tough. Now quit interrupting me. There was this girl that I always thought was kind of cute… well, maybe not when I was really young, because back then I still thought that girls were creepy, but—"

"Be quiet!"

"—but I was so ecstatic when she turned out to be on my genin team years later, along with that asshole. But that's really like six years down the road of the story. First I should probably tell you about the trouble I had with my chuunin sensei while I was—"

"_I told you to shut your mouth!_"

"—while I was still in school under him. He was a bit of a spazz, which is probably why he never got past chuunin, and he could be a total hard ass about someone coming in tardy, so I got in trouble with him a lot. But it's not my fault that there's always—"

"_GODDAMNIT JUST SHUT UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE!_"

.-.-.

Hatake Kakashi had a million and one things on his plate after he was made (temporary, he insisted) Hokage. There was a little debate whether he should be called the Rokudaime or the Nanadaime among many, due to Danzo, but pretty much the only people that could even remember to call him Hokage-sama were the jounin that chose him originally and the non-military officials that didn't know him too well before. He wasn't answering to any of it, anyway; he made it very clear that he wanted to step down as soon as Tsunade came out of the coma.

Paperwork was just what he did when he had time to _spare_, what with all the trouble from the Akatsuki and Tobi's declaration of their goal—The Moon's Eye Plan—on top of the complications Danzo has made in the ruined Konohagakure by his grasp at power and subsequent disappearance. With all this disarray, he had to act as hub for the Leaf ninja, and he still had duties to fulfill on top of that which only he could be given, since he was the only one that was given sufficient training in the called areas to act on them. Never mind the trouble from his students.

An ultimate genjutsu that would, essentially, make every man, woman and child fall under the whim of an omniscient, omnipresent—and, by appearances, omnipotent—Uchiha Madara… The very notion seemed more than fantastical. Madara's goal was to become Kami-sama… to become God Himself, and to transcend past physical mortality. But the jutsu that Danzo himself succeeded with in usurping power through the Sharingan he possessed shows that there's at least a modicum of possibility, and as Danzo used this ability in very much the same way with very much the same goals as Madara now proclaimed, it wasn't beyond comprehension that someone, upon gaining these powers, would make this sort of plot.

Of the five kages present at the meeting, three outright declared they would not allow the Akatsuki to have the remaining two Jinchuuriki. Danzo had by that point skipped out and escaped, but it didn't take long for the Lord of Kuni no Hi to find out about Danzo's methods of gaining power, and the other choice presented to him was quickly, and with little warning, instated. Of course, with the Tsuchikage prudently keeping the option of using the Jinchuuriki in the war, there was a four-to-one (including Mifune, leader of Iron) for keeping Killer Bee and Naruto that wanted to protect them instead, not considering how these two acknowledged "unpredictable" ninja would react. _This_ was the mess that Kakashi inherited.

So he did a lot of surveying, a lot of meetings, had to give out more commands than his tongue was used to giving, so he found his jaw getting sore. And it was hard to convince his "subordinates" to let him on the battlefield as well! Quickly he understood why Minato-sensei had so much trouble and was always so busy during his short run as the Yondaime. Naruto muttered in abject envy about his sensei's luck, while Kakashi himself would have gladly cast off his "luck" for Naruto to pick up so he could zip off in a sprint towards the carnage. Between all these duties and meetings, he didn't even have time to read!

Presently, he did some more surveying to the continued rebuilding of the village. It was almost finished, nearly to the point that it was perfect and in full function again, but Tenzo was effectively exhausted and was given leave before he killed himself from chakra burnout, and the result was that Kakashi was dragged out with greater frequency to keep the groups' morale up enough that they'd work together, if not be forced to make them work together himself. He was scratching his head tiredly while Naruto and Sakura chattered at him, the two students that now insisted on acting as his assistants (though they were definitely plotting to have Naruto sneak out fight along side everyone else). So absorbed with all this he was that he didn't even hear the old man until he repeated himself a second time.

"Excuse me! Are you Hatake Kakashi? You're Hatake Kakashi, right?"

The silver-haired Hokage turned his head with a frown covered by his mask to the little old man, stooped over and leaning on a knotted wooden staff. He did not recognize the man and assumed he was only trying to talk to him about Hokage business. Well, at least he didn't call him "Hokage-sama."

Kakashi turned himself fully towards the old man and motioned his "assistants" to stop walking and do the same. "I am. What's the trouble? I'm in the middle of something at the moment, so if you could be quick…"

He sighed heavily in understanding of just who the person he had to talk to was and looked to the sky as if to say, "Really? _This_ is what I have to deal with?" He then shook his head with a face like he had a crick in his neck that he'd never been able to pop out. "It won't take but a moment." He looked like his errand was more of an inconvenience to himself than the horrendously swamped Hokage. "My own name is unimportant, but I am a spiritual medium from the Eastern edge of the country. Since the destruction of Konohagakure, a strange event where the ninja that died here had returned to life had put the spiritual world a bit askew. I understand you had been one of the—err—_temporary casualties_, and had been spoken to by your father."

Kakashi's visible eye blinked a few times rapidly while Sakura and Naruto looked up at him and watched his reaction. "I see. Yes, that's true. So you truly speak to the dead?" The man was either a psychic as he claimed, or Kakashi had been talking in his sleep and someone was listening.

"I would go into my credentials—Hokage-sama—" Kakashi suppressed a groan. Well, _there_ went being called by his name. "—as a medium, but I believe that should be sufficient for you to take me seriously." The old man took his staff and thrust its end to the ground before him, making the dried nuts on it clack. "Most of the trouble in the spiritual world from that has been sorted out, but one particular spirit has been a thorn in my side. A young ninja, Uchiha Obito, insists that I speak to you on his behalf."

"Obito?" Kakashi's head tilted.

Naruto's and Sakura's eyes widened. "Uchicha?!"

"Your comrade from your original team under Namikaze Minato. You knew him since you were young, and he died at the age of thirteen on the battlefield, shortly after you became a jounin. He saved your life. Behind that hitae-ate of yours is his eye, put into your head by your other teammate." He stated all this as simple fact, hitting his staff butt against the hard ground again. "The boy told me his life's story so many times by now, I could quote his death in my sleep!"

Kakashi nodded dully, feeling oddly exposed with all this proclaimed out in the open like this, and at such a time. "And… what is it that Obito wishes to say to me, Fortune-Teller-san?"

"He's been complaining that you've been lazy, Hokage-sama."

The eye flew wide. "Lazy!" Kakashi exclaimed, actually looking as if he was offended. This old man was making a bold declaration! "Do you have any idea how much work it is to be Hokage?"

The old man went silent for a few moments, but was not perturbed by Kakashi's reaction the least bit. Instead, he was looking off to the side as if he was listening to someone unseen. "He says you've been lazy from before that. For five years." Another pause. "He insists that you haven't been keeping your promise."

Kakashi's brows furrowed, but his eye widened slightly and his students saw guilt. Then his eye closed. "I understand. So he can't forgive me for breaking my promise. I suppose deserve that much."

The old man frowned and looked to the side again. "He's very angry."

"…Please tell him that I'm sorry I've disappointed him."

"He's insisting that you get back to it and quit being so lazy. Otherwise he'll never forgive you."

"Hn?" Kakashi was confused and assumed he misinterpreted something, so he made a guess at what the old man most logically meant, since what he said didn't make sense. "The ghost of my friend wants me back at work as Hokage?" Why'd he make the old psychic come to talk to him, then? Wouldn't that really be a waste of everyone's time?

"No, no, no." The old man shook his head. "He wants you to get back at keeping your promise about that girl, Rin. He's angry that you haven't been protecting her and taking care of her adequately during the past five years and he wants you to get back to it. He won't forgive you if you abandon her now, says that ignorance is no excuse and—" He paused to listen to the unseen ghost. "He knows that you won't forgive yourself either, if you don't get back to it before it's too late."

The Hokage continued to stare forward in confusion for several long seconds, his dumbfounded state needing the time to thaw and melt off to realization. "Rin!" he finally croaked from a suddenly dry throat, "Rin is…!" He covered his mouth with a hand, which looked strange since it was already covered with his mask.

"Yes, yes. She's alive," the old man snapped crisply, "You were tricked. Anyway, are you going to get back to protecting her like you promised? Can I get this silly _child_ to leave now and go home already?!" Immediately afterward he winced and leaned away from where he had been looking, plugging an ear with a finger. "_Please_ say that you will! If I have to hear his life story one more time, _I think I'll have to kill myself!_"

"Yes! Of course!" Kakashi shouted and nearly lept forward. He took the old man's hands into his own and shook them. "Thank you so much! Where is she? Can you tell me?"

The staff had fallen to the ground and the old man's shoulders were bobbing up and down from how vigorously Kakashi was shaking his hands. "O-only something about being b-beyond the forests. He s-says he'll help you, l-like always. B-being his eye." The medium retrieved his hands and made a stiff bow down as far as his back would allow it. "He's very happy, now that you said you'll keep your promise. Maybe he'll go in peace… and leave me in peace as well!" He retrieved his staff from where it fell. "Thank you for your time, Hokage-sama."

"No, thank you, sir. I hope that you will please have an easy and pleasant time going back to your home."

"Hmph! I'd almost rather I keeled over dead on this spot just to save me the trip!"

Kakashi laughed sheepishly. "If there's anything I can do…"

"No, no, I hate traveling with ninja. They have a list of spirits clinging on them, and I'm not interested in doing any more _pro bono_ work this week. Health and luck to you, Hokage-sama."

Kakashi watched the man turn and leave and even waved him as he went off, shouting a "thank you" in his wake. Then he turned to his flabbergasted students, stricken silent by the abnormal exchange they had just witnessed, and their sensei's bewildering behavior. "Well! We have a lot of work to do! And another task on our agenda." He actually looked _happy_ as he said this. _Happy_ about doing _work_. "We should get busy, ne?"

They nodded slowly together, neither really sure if they were ever so frightened as they were now. "H-hai."

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BOO!


End file.
